Digital Media Art Pioneers
As pioneering digital media artists, Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss have been exploring interactive media since 1987. Their work spans new media art, architecture, sensory interfaces and non-linear narratives. As artists, they were the first to hold research fellowships at the KHM - Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and at the GMD - German National Research Center for IT in Sankt Augustin, Germany (1992/93). Founders and leading figures of prominent art, science and technology institutions such as ART+COM (1987) in Berlin, La Première Rue (1989) in Briey, FR and MARS - Exploratory Media Lab (1996) at GMD, they are also known for their eCulture Factory (2005) at the Fraunhofer Institute for AI. They have contributed to interactive art and media education through platforms such as netzspannung.org (1997 - 2010) and ECCO, their gesture-driven interface for large-scale exhibitions and public spaces, which received a US patent in 2007 and has had applications such as MARS Bag, Info-Jukebox and PointScreen.
I ARTISTIC RESEARCH: ART+COM (1987-1992)
In 1987, urban planning professor Edouard Bannwart [Link] founded Artec in Berlin, while neighboring artists and architects Fleischmann and Strauss founded ArtWork. Together they established research in the fields of art, architecture and digital media. In the same year, ART+COM (The Billion Dollar Code) was formed as the first independent research institute for art and digital technology in Germany. It became a legal association, ART+COM e.V., in 1988 after receiving approval from the Research Council of the City of Berlin for three long-term research projects: New Media in Urban Planning,[Link] conceptualized by Edouard Bannwart and Visualization of Digital Medical Data [Link] by physicist Wolfgang Krueger, who came from Mental Images, [Link] and The Electronic House - Light and Acoustics as Comfort Criteria in Space, by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss as part of the design for the Hewlett Packard headquarters in Berlin (1988-91). [Link] These projects, which combined artistic and scientific elements, were supported by companies such as Telekom-Berkom, Hewlett Packard, Siemens, Silicon Graphics, and Sun.
II EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH: VISWIZ - Visualization Wizards (1992-1994)
Fleischmann and Strauss were fortunate to be appointed by Wolfgang Krueger and Bernd Girod as visiting scientists at GMD - the German Research Center for Information Technology - and as fellows at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) in Cologne. As KHM fellows and with the newly founded GMD VisWiz (Visual Wizards) group, they have made significant advances in the artistic understanding of Mixed Reality, following on from their contributions to the field of Virtual Reality. Their vision is that the pure functionalism of technological research should always be undermined by cultural meaning. The VizWiz group, later renamed VMSD (Visualization and Media Systems Design) [Link], is dedicated to visualization and the conception and design of interfaces addressing haptic and tactile perception.
III ART & SCIENCE: MARS Media Art ReSearch Lab (1995-2012) with eCulture Factory (2005-2008)
These achievements led to the establishment of the MARS [Link] Media Art Research Lab [Link] as one of four departments of the new GMD Institute for Media Communication, which later became the Fraunhofer Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. Fleischmann and Strauss secured European and national funding for more than 25 researchers and initiated or participated in projects such as eRENA (Electronic Arenas for Art, Culture, Society), which invented tools for the art of tomorrow such as contactless interface technologies, or SONG - Portals of the Next Generation, which developed 3D prototypes for multi-user environments, and other projects such as CAST - Communication of Art, Science & Technology, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, or the eCulture Factory project, funded by the Bremen Senate with EU funds. As part of eRENA, the lab created Murmuring Fields (1997-99), a sequel to Home of the Brain, but as voices on an MR stage. [Link] A walk-in soundstage using camera tracking for performers to generate sound through movement. [Link] They also developed electro-field sensing, which led to the beeping Energy Meter or the sounding MARS Bag (1998), a reflective handbag, and the patented PointScreen [Link] (1997-2002), which allows non-contact body interaction based on human electrostatic energy.
In Energy Passages (2004), supported by the Munich Senate for Culture, the artists use AI techniques to create a unique representation of public life. As sound researcher Holger Schulze points out: "It feels as if all the latest news is flowing through us as we immerse ourselves in this stream of words. The installation bridges two usually separate areas of public life: information and the city itself," says curator and media theorist Christiane Paul. City dwellers, of course, inhabit both spaces. But they rarely have the opportunity to see them as interconnected networks or to collectively reshape them. Energy_Passages literally rewrites the energy pathways that shape our daily lives onto the street. "In this way, passers-by are invited to "perform" the events of the day and their multiple semantic connections".
History of Pen and Gesture Computing and the ECCO Patent [Link]
"Gesture-based input device for a user interface of a computer", Monika Fleischmann; Wolfgang Strauss; Yinlin Li; Christoph Groenegress, 2004. [Link] US Patent 7,312,788, December 25, 2007 [Link] Pointscreen - Minority Report HCI - Interface für berührungslose Navigation (2003). PointScreen – Interaktion ohne BerührungPointScreen - Interaktion (pdf).
Google Scholar:
Monika Fleischmann,
Wolfgang Strauss.
Urban Media
2014
» Visualizing the hidden city - Make the inhabitants interests visible. Artistic research example:
Energy-Passages
Online Training
2013
»
Curating Media Arts with Scoop.it (2012-16)
» Philosophy & Practice. Testing a MOOC at
Stanford University (2013)
»
Getting Older with the Flow with a MOOC on
Design Thinking at
Stanford University
Performing the Archive 2009-13
»
Narrative and semantic interfaces for digital archives.
Wissenskünste 2004 - ongoing.
» Staging information, data mapping, information visualisation, tools for knowledge discovery, digital information as aesthetic experience, knowledge arts.
» Lecture: The Digital Archive as Find Machine - Staging the Knowledge Space, 2012 (Link ppt on slideshare)
» Lecture: Interfacing the Archive - The Media Art Portal netzspannung.org on Possible Futures, São Paulo, Brazil 2012. Paper on ZKM Academia.
Research & Education
1997 - ongoing
»
CAT - Communication of Art and Technology 1997-2004. Research & development of
netzspannung.org (online since 2001), community based online platform & archive for Media Arts Research & Education.
History and
development workshops.
Digital Sparks
2001 - 08.
» Student contest in German speaking Europe. Long term researchon curated community generated content combined with monitoring media art education.
Digital Sparks 2001-08, New Media Art & Music projects for teaching and
learning.
eCulture Factory 2005.
» eCulture Factory => Interview with invited guests to inaugurate the eCulture Factory at Bremen University of Applied Sciences.
» Media Arts Research Transfer Project into digital products: Virtual Book, Interactive Poster, Media Flow - and other Archive-Browser for exhibitions in Art, Science & Industry as well as Theremin-based Interfaces such as the PointScreen gesture based patented technology.
» Theremin-Praktikumsarbeit von Donzelli-Goldschmidt-Hornischer-Nuber-Schulze-Wüst, Betreuer George, Universität Göttingen, 2010 (Image), (PR).
SONG - PortalS of Next Generation 1999-2001.
» Applied Mixed Reality Multi-User environments and tangible interfaces, MPEG-4, Avatars and Agents.
Safira 1999-2001
» Supporting affective interaction in real time applications.Providing computers with the ability to model and express human-likeemotions with usually impossible capabilities.
eRENA 1997-2000
» Electronic aRENAs for Culture, Performance, Art & Entertainment. Digital Technologies for performative artistic production.
Intro,
Tools, Publication (link).
Partner: KTH, ZKM, MiraLab, Nottingham, GMD.